~ Lori is a short, solid woman with a wild mane of frizzy blonde hair that hangs loose to her thick waist and shot through with fine silver strands that remind me of the thin, metallic tinsel threads we strung on the Christmas tree each December when we were kids. I liked her from the minute she walked through the door, smiley faced, lively, light brown eyes honing in on each of our faces with an air of what felt like genuine warmth and concern.
A spark of mutual acknowledgment passed between her and Walter, reinforcing my instincts that the two of them were more than neighbors.
I guess neither of them is of an age to bust up a good solid friendship with the sorts of dull, routine domestic arrangements that living together calls for. If Walter and Lori choose to keep to their own routines, their own business, in the knowledge and comfort of their caring for each other at their age being more of a benefit than a commitment — hell, there is nothing wrong with that. For a second or two, my thoughts wandered to Maggie and me. Would that be the type of arrangement we would maintain down the line? I hope not. My desire is to be with her, beside her, the full deal.
Walter had been gone a while that winter, still, he and Lori moved comfortably around one another, close to touching yet maintaining a slight distance, as if it was a dance of some sort that they had practice at. I hoped at least, given their obvious enjoyment and appreciation of each other, it was a more private reunion they’d savored while the batch of banana nut muffins baked.
He handed Lori a mug of sweet and spicy orange scented tea. “Your favorite, I brought it up from Willits,” he said, smiling at her, as she pulled up a chair. We three listened to Walter share with us how, over the past few trimming seasons especially, he had learned how to spot an abandoned grow site in an instant. “I’m well aware of all the telltale signs — diversion of water, withering stalks, dead song birds caught up in drying wire.”
Walter told how a buddy of his had recently come across a clearing in the forest while hiking in what he thought was a safe area: “He was not the first to stumble on a pile of burned trash, empty sacks of toxic pesticides, more than a dozen carcasses of endangered animals poisoned, no doubt, by lethal bait.”
“So tragic. Whatever happened to weed being a sacrament of the earth?” Lori asked.
She and a group of townsfolk had organized themselves into a neighborhood watch of sorts.
“Locals on the Lookout, we keep an eye out for the community,” she explained. “At the same time, we do what we can for the safety of the younger ones, the trimmigrants who spill out onto the sidewalks downtown at the start of each harvest season.”
Lori said they didn’t have to do this, she and her friends and neighbors, but their efforts benefitted everyone seeing as otherwise, the dumpster diving, stealing and depositing of filthy waste in the river water and under the bridges would be way worse than it already was.
“It’s a disaster of sorts,” she said, her facial expression set into one of frustrated resignation. “One way or another and though we all do rely on the economy of the cannabis industry up here in many ways, it’s simply grown out of control. The days of petty crimes have passed. Missing people and murders are now commonplace.”
Walter spoke of private militia outfits hired on as SWAT teams by the big property owners that are rightfully infuriated by the volume of illegal grows.
“Leech bosses of bastard guerilla operations are razor sharp, they’re fluid and adaptive and that’s the problem. They’ve permeated the more remote pockets of the state with an interconnected network of crime and they’ll stop at nothing.”
Lori positioned herself with her plump round back held straight, her shoulders rising and falling as she talked of the ironies within the traveling culture that passes through the region, in particular, the so-called Rainbow People, those who choose to celebrate unconditional love and freedom devoid of consumerism within the forests and the rivers of the world. “Their values sound refreshing, but they too have a dark side,” she said.
“Utopia’s not all its cracked up to be?” Maggie asked.
Lori smiled. “It’s a nice idea to build a world free from accountability and government, but so many of those who come here, they take, take, take from our limited resources, most of which are provided by our own community members,” she said. “Those who do pay into the nonprofit system and local services do so with tithes if not taxes.”
She took notes on a pad of paper from all that Maggie was able to tell her about Mia’s increasingly troubling situation. Maggie dropped a photo of her niece directly into Lori’s phone for her to share.
“She’s a good-looking girl, for sure. Mixed blood?” Lori asked. “You don’t know how sorry I am to say this, given Mia’s present position being unknown, but it’s the white girls, the German and the French and Canadian students, they’re the ones who get hired up here first and they’re the girls who the authorities take the most notice of if anything goes wrong.”
“So, are you suggesting Mia being half Mexican puts her lower on the list?” Maggie asked.
“I’m afraid so,” Lori replied. “It’s all so wrong, you don’t have to tell me.”
We listened intently as Lori explained how the big-boned, blonde haired, blue-eyed international travelers, girls and guys both, students, the ones who hold up their handwritten signs touting their ethnicity and work ethic are able to use the race card as a surefire method for being snapped up out of the crowd.
I looked over at Maggie. She was growing visibly more troubled and restless in her chair, scratching her head, fidgeting anxiously with her hair. Walter took notice, and, after catching my eye, he turned his attention back to Lori. I reached up to take Maggie’s hand from her head and hold it in my own.
“The legitimate growers are not interested in any funny business,” Lori said. “If they don’t already have a regular setup with a reliable trimming team, they want to know that they’re taking on the type of trimmer who’ll get the job done with minimal fuss, those who will be on their way once harvest is done.”
“Lori’s main concern is for the unknown numbers of exploited young souls such as Jazmin and Mia, those who find themselves enslaved on guerilla grows — men, women, duped into all manner of subservience, from manning the crop in the middle of nowhere for months on end to being chicaned and drugged and blindfolded and forced into domestic and sexual slavery,” Walter interjected. “I’m sorry to be so brutal about it, but it’s time to face facts.”
I looked across at Maggie. Her face fell. Tears welled in her eyes. “We’re going to find her,” I promised, squeezing her hand. We’d been given no information as yet from Bridget as to who it was who had held the girls against their will over the winter months, but whoever it was, facts were veering toward Walter’s depiction of the sorts of dire circumstances the girls had managed to get themselves caught up in.
Lori flipped open her laptop she’d carried in. Logging into Walter’s sketchy Wi-Fi, she pulled up a photo folder of the faces of hundreds of youngsters snapped on camera during the pre-harvest and early harvest season.
“We do our best to urge these kids to move on,” she said. “We let them know in no uncertain terms there’s little chance of finding work. If they persist, or we see them again, we snap a photo and download it onto our files.”
Maggie stood behind her as Lori scrolled through dozens of young faces, most of them hopeful, others more desperate looking, others more vacant, many displaying multiple piercings and facial tattoos.
“Stop!” Maggie yelled. “That’s her, that’s Mia.”
Lori flipped her laptop around for Walter and me to see. Mia and her friend Jazmin were sat side by side looking directly up at the camera. There they were, captured in the moment, head to head, smiling for a photo with the innocence of youth.
The two girls were seated on a sidewalk, captured in their bikini tops, two girls in a sea of young faces. Mia held a sign above their heads — “Fast, Fun Non-Smokers” it said.
Each had worn her long hair tied back, their hopeful, open faces directed at the camera. Maggie zoomed in. Strands of wooden beads were wrapped around their wrists interspersed with three or four inches of brightly colored, woven bracelets. The sun shone down on the start of what they’d imagined as their first big adventure. I knew that feeling. The one I’d had when I was first deployed.
I detected a note of self-absorption in Mia’s young face, a face I’d never taken much notice of, but one I had known from when she was a kid. She’d been in it for herself, I sensed, no clue of the trouble she’d dragged her pal into. Never underestimate a teenager.
Lori said she’d print out the image of the girls and walk it up to what the locals dubbed “Hippie Hill”, a tent city just outside of town. “We’ll ask around,” she said. “Won’t hurt to start there.”
She went home to pick up the Taser she told us that she takes out with her more frequently these days. “Way too many vagrants hanging about for my liking,” she said.
“It’s not the students, or the worldly wanderers who are causing the trouble,” Walter added. “They move on. It’s the ones who stay, assuming they have stumbled on the land of buds and honey in answer to their prayers.”
Walter described how he had been threatened and physically assaulted on more than one occasion over the previous year or two. “We’ve been forced to resort to arming ourselves one way or another,” he said. “Hence the pistol.”
Lori stood and tucked a thick strand of hair behind her pixie ear that was hung with a long, dangling turquoise-beaded earring. Walter told us she teaches English at the same high school that he and Connie retired from. “I came to it late after a difficult divorce,” she said. “Found my calling.”
The teacher in her placed her hands on her ample hips. “It’s our job, those who love this place, to become a sort of citizen police,” she said, glancing out of the window into the winter garden of collards, kale and Swiss chard she’d kept an eye on for Walter while he was away.
“Way too many people continue to pretend these terrible things are not happening,” Lori said. “If and when the black market does settle down, maybe after time, the dangers will stop. Until then, we’ve had little choice but to take the law into our own hands.”
Chapter 21
Jazmín
Two hella scary dudes with assault rifles strung across their chests stood guard in the middle of a rectangular group of shitty looking aluminum trailers and a two-story concrete building at the rear. It appeared to me at first sight, a stark, military-style setup.
Light shone through narrow slits of windows in the main building, otherwise it was pitch-dark outside. What I was able to figure out right away was that this menacinglooking compound Mia and me had wound up at was set in a densely forested mountaintop a hundred times more secluded than Bruce and Bonnie’s place.
I reached out in the dark and squeezed hold of Mia’s hand. She held on tight. My knees buckled and I would have fallen to the ground on the spot if it weren’t for Mia’s grip.
“In here,” Jefe Hombre hustled us in through the metal doorway of the main building. I figured maybe it was some sort of abandoned station back from the days of the logging boom Miguel had talked about.
The mean-faced, gun-toting dudes carried in a bunch of cases of Corona, bottled water, boxes of groceries from the back of the truck, enough to supply a small army.
Inside, the stark ground floor was basically one big room, dimly lit with old fluorescent tubes, plastic foldout tables and chairs, a couple of ratty couches and a makeshift camp kitchen at the far end.
Two younger looking Latina girls in the kitchen area barely dared look up from their work to see who’d arrived. One of them was stirring a big, ol’ heavy pot of some sort of stew, while the other was heating a pile of tortillas. It was almost like they were expecting us. No big deal to them. Anyway, the food smelled good, despite everything and my stomach growled. We hadn’t eaten in 24 hours by that point.
Jefe Hombre barked orders at the two girls. “Stop what you’re doing. Take them upstairs,” he said, pushing us toward them. “Carry their sleeping bags. Make up their bunks.”
One, whose name was Camila motioned for us to follow her as she led us up a narrow stairway to the second floor. “You?” she asked, in Spanish. “What is your name?” — like we are going to be around long enough to be pals, I thought. Still, she looked kind, relieved for the female company, I assumed. We would soon found out why.
Valeria was the other one tiptoeing around in their dirty white athletic socks, no shoes. They led the way up into a windowless, loft-style room barely big enough for two sets of narrow steel bunks.
“Ours,” Camila pointed to the bunk beds on the left. “Yours,” she said, in Spanish. Long, thin, sagging mattresses were stained with God knows what.
It wasn’t really a room, more an alcove with an old curtain drawn limply on a rail to separate the space from the drafty staircase and hallway.
Camila handed me a pile of shabby threadbare sheets. No pillow. She opened the door to a small bathroom. I stepped back. It reeked of men, of sweat and pee and of strong, nasty cologne.
Jefe Hombre stood at the bottom of the staircase. A sharp knife-edge of fear pierced the back of my neck. “Don’t be getting too comfortable up there,” he snapped, in Spanish, for he spoke no English. “There’s work to be done down here.”
The door opened downstairs, a noisy group of Latino men aged from late teens to early forties, I guessed, filtered in and gathered in the downstairs eating area.
I was shaking as I made my way downstairs behind my equally freaked out buddy. All eyes were on Mia and me. Mia, Miguel and Bonnie had promised to keep me safe. Well, so much for that.
Tears welled up and threatened to spill as I thought of my parents and the little ones, worried sick about me, I just knew it, like the cold sense of impending doom that had come over me. It was the shame of it that would be the worst, knowing that we’d done this to ourselves, Mia and me. It was her idea but I’d agreed to it. We had no one but ourselves to blame.
After the men had eaten their fill of the tortillas and stew, we were given permission to eat whatever little was left of it. Camila and Valeria served the four of us in silence, scraping the pan for the last of scraps of the meat. Mia and me, we were so frightened and at the same time so hungry we could barely swallow. Jefe Hombre had rifled through our packs and frisked our pockets, whisking away our high school student ID’s, our shoes. The only thing he’d left us with was our sleeping bags.
Right away he ordered two of his men to lead us outside by the shoulders, barefoot and single file. Mia whimpered as he forced us to sit. It was Jefe Hombre himself who tied our wrists to the arms of two rusty metal chairs set around a smoldering firepit.
It was the other fucker who gathered my hair in his fist, holding it above my head. I never saw it coming. I had no idea. The bastard sealed my immediate fate with the shock of burning flesh, a searing and excruciating pain, the sizzle of a smoldering iron beneath the thin surface of skin on the back of my neck. I screamed bloody fucking murder for all the good it did me, kicking my bare feet in the dirt. What were we? No better than the helpless cattle in the fields back home. Mia looked on, shaking, horrified. I heard her sob and plead as I threw up.
Mia’s pleas for mercy made no difference. She knew she was next as she darted her dark, wide eyes back and forth between that group of monsters and me, transfixed, petrified, begging to be spared. She fixed her eyes on my trembling lower lip. I bit the inside of my cheeks to stop my screaming, for her sake.
They’d branded us with the sign of a cross, Mia and me before she too hurled the sparse contents of her stomach big time on the ground at her feet.
Camila and Valeria were given orders to untie our hands and take us back into the building. Once inside, in turn, they raised their long, thick braids from their shoulders in a show of silent unity. We each shared the same tortured brand. Camila was twitchy, super
nervous. She kept on catching her breath like she was reliving her own pain as she gently soaked my scorched skin with a cold, wet towel. Valeria applied a soothing aloe vera gel she told us she had made herself, along with what I think must have been an antibiotic cream of some kind. The two girls taped strips of loose gauze around my and Mia’s necks.
It was during that horror-filled first night of humiliation and pain that yet more of our miserable, immediate destiny was laid out for us to digest. Mia’s main job from thereon out was to please Jefe Hombre. As for me, I was promptly handed over to his main man, Jose Luis, the devil himself, the fucker responsible for the branding.
Don’t for a minute think that we were not disgusted, sickened, repelled to the pits of our stomachs. We were all of that and more. But we’re no fools, Mia and me, we knew better than to resist to the point of greater punishment, total humiliation, death even, at least not until we knew we had a plan.
“We’ll make it out of here if it kills us,” she kept on telling me. “They don’t know who they’re dealing with,” Mia whispered, rocking side to side, our arms around each other, much later, though still in the midst of the shock and the hurt and the total fear and degradation of the events of that first sickening night. We lay on our stomachs on top of our sleeping bags on our narrow bunks, our necks aflame with pain, our insides churning, the sound of those torturous maniacs snoring in the narrow rooms close by. A remember how a lone coyote howled in the distance.
“OK, this is what we do,” Mia whispered into my ear the next morning, her fists clenched, tears rolling down her cheeks. “We’re gonna force ourselves to play at being robots in our minds. Think of your body as not belonging to your brain, J. It’s the only way we’ll get ourselves through this.” Mia was a virgin when she came to this place. Vomit rose in the back of my throat and I cringed at the thought of what had already happened, what was happening to her, to me what was to go on happening, over and over. Life as we’d known it was done.
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